Various types of controlled-environment facilities are present in today's society, and persons may be voluntary or involuntary residents of such facilities, whether temporarily or permanently. Examples of controlled-environment facilities may include correctional institutions (e.g., municipal jails, county jails, state prisons, federal prisons, military stockades, juvenile facilities, detention camps, home incarceration environments, etc.), healthcare facilities (e.g., hospitals, nursing homes, mental health facilities, rehabilitation facilities, such as drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities, etc.), restricted living quarters (e.g., hotels, resorts, camps, dormitories, barracks, etc.), and the like.
During his or her incarceration, an inmate or other controlled-environment facility resident, may be afforded opportunities to communicate with the outside world. For example, by allowing prisoners to have some contact with friends and family while incarcerated, the justice system aims to facilitate their transition back into society upon release. Traditional forms of contact include telephone calls, and the like. More recently, technological advances have allowed controlled-environment facilities such as jails and prisons to provide other types of visitation, including individual-to-individual videoconferences, and the like. Traditional communication services provide residents of controlled-environment facilities (such as correctional facilities) the ability to place outbound phone calls to non-residents (i.e., a person not incarcerated or otherwise committed to a controlled-environment facility). Additionally, non-residents can typically schedule video visitation with residents (inmates) of the controlled-environment facility. Basically, these and other forms of communication aim to facilitate communication between a resident of a controlled-environment facility and a non-resident.
Problematically, a party to a call, such as a non-resident called by, or who called, a resident of a controlled environment facility may attempt to facilitate communication between the resident and another resident of the same or different controlled environment facility by placing a three-way call, multiparty call, conference call, or the like. Another manner in which a party may attempt to facilitate communication between two residents of (a) controlled environment facility(ies) may employ two telephone lines, wherein the outside party simply places the receivers connected to each of the two lines earpiece to mouthpiece.
Existing systems and methods for controlled-environment facility multiparty communication detection seek to match voiceprints across calls (including calls from different jurisdictions) to see if calls taking place at the same time show the same voiceprint (i.e. if a resident's voice shows up in two concurrent calls, he or she must be participating in some sort of multi-party call). However, false positives may result from failure to differentiate the resident from the outside party. For example, some parties are allowed to speak to multiple inmates, such as an attorney who may have one inmate on hold while conversing with another. In such a case, the existing voice recognition-based system monitoring the residents' controlled-environment facility's (or facilities') communications may detect a three-way call based on the attorney's voice being on two (permitted) concurrent calls. System “spoken” prompts (i.e. recorded prompts) that are included in typical controlled-environment facility resident calls, or which may be invoked by a resident call (i.e. outside telephone system recordings or messages (e.g. generic outgoing voicemail messages, etc.)) may be recognized across multiple concurrent calls, resulting in detection of a same “voice” on each of those calls. Further, limitations in voice modeling to uniquely and/or accurately match individuals may result in false positives, especially given the need to attempt to differentiate multiple speakers from a single recording. That is, in most existing systems, such multiparty call detection using voice recognition is not in real-time. Calls must be recorded and completed, voice modeled, and then compared against a large collection of other such (concurrent) calls. Moreover, existing voice recognition-based multiparty call detection systems are not applicable for all calls. For example, voice modeling only works if a sufficient amount of an individual's talk-time can be identified and extensive sharing of data records across jurisdictions is not practical.
Additionally, over the past several years, a sharp increase in the U.S. inmate population has not been followed by a proportional increase in the number of prison or jail staff. To the contrary, budget pressures in local, state, and federal governments have made it difficult for correctional facilities to maintain an adequate number of wardens, officers, and other administration personnel. Hence, many correctional facilities are often challenged, or unable, to perform investigations with respect to their own inmates.